Chapter 21
Quinn
“And what makes you so sure this rift is important?” Rollick asked as he turned the wheel to follow the curve of the road.
I spoke up for the gargoyle. “Crag could sense that there was a lot of shadowkind activity near it—a bunch of them, and at least one particularly powerful one. It’s got to be the sorcerer-killers, right?”
Not just sorcerer-killers now, I corrected myself silently. Human-killers in general. I restrained a shudder at the memory of the savaged man we’d seen on the street earlier this night.
“More tricks from the big beasts,” Lance muttered in the back seat, clicking his claws together restlessly.
“We might be able to learn more about their plans,” Crag says. “I could go ahead and?—”
Rollick shook his head, peering down the road through the glow of the lights along the highway. “We all stay together until we find the spot. I want to get some idea what we’re dealing with before we decide on a strategy.”
I squinted at the sky, still black and dotted with stars. I couldn’t make anything out, but then, I hadn’t seen anything other than a brief, vague distortion when I’d first spotted the rift. It’d vanished before my gaze right afterward, even though Crag had still been able to identify it.
I guessed that made sense. If mortals had been able to see the rifts shadowkind used to travel between their world and ours, their existence wouldn’t have been anywhere near as secret. But what were the villainous duo doing that had affected this one enough that I’d caught a glimpse of it?
Hopefully we’d be able to find that out.
Rollick must have been able to sense the rift in some way too, because he veered off onto a side road abruptly but with a clear sense of purpose. He drove up the slope of one of the hills along the coast, the road winding back and forth up the side with signs for a lookout point at the top. But halfway up, he pulled the car as far as he could onto the shoulder and parked. “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”
I gathered my bag and my crossbow, my pulse kicking up a notch. I had no idea what we were going to find out here—whether it might be even more horrifying than what we’d already discovered about these monsters.
The road here was cloaked in almost total darkness. I walked as briskly as I could along the shoulder while placing my feet carefully to avoid falling, thankful again for my past urban explorations tramping around in abandoned buildings and private skyscraper stairwells. Who could have predicted what handy preparation they’d be for this new phase of my life?
“Could it be they’re just bringing more shadowkind minions through to the mortal realm?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “They were doing that over by Miami too, right?”
“We never saw any strange energy around the rift there like the one here tonight,” Crag said.
Rollick nodded. “For something to be happening that would make the portal visible even to mortal eyes, they’re up to more than standard immigration. I’m very curious to discover what that is.”
We hustled the rest of the way in silence, Crag striding a little ahead to scan the vegetation for lurking beasts, Lance shifting into his dragon form to leap and weave between the shrubs with typical wild grace. Watching him brought a pang into my heart. I glanced at Rollick, who was still marching along beside me.
“Are you sure Lance should have come? If either of the leaders use their sorcery again…”
“I gave him strict orders to retreat immediately if he senses either of those ancients nearby,” the demon said. “And I think, given his past experience with them, he’ll actually follow my orders for once. We don’t have many allies we can count on, sorcerer. We can’t afford to coddle those who are willing to stand with us.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You encouraged me to send them away for their protection. What happened to that perspective?”
He shrugged casually as if it didn’t matter much to him, but a twinge of emotion carried into me that tasted like regret. “I didn’t know how vast a threat we were up against. We’ve sorted out the situation now.”
“So you’re admitting you were wrong,” I couldn’t help needling.
He cast me a baleful look, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. “It does happen, though only on very rare occasions.”
Ahead of us, Crag grunted. He was looking back toward the ocean. “There it is again.”
We all spun around. I caught just the faintest waver in the sky beyond the top of the hill before its surface smoothed out again. My pulse stuttered.
Rollick frowned, apparently no surer than before what might have caused the phenomenon. “Our enemies do like to keep busy,” he remarked. “Come on.”
We left the road and scrambled the rest of the way up the hill more directly. At its peak, I hung back at the far end of the lookout’s parking lot with Lance standing guard while the demon and the gargoyle approached the crest overlooking the sea. My fingers tightened around the handle of the crossbow.
After a minute, Rollick motioned us over. He pointed down toward a small peninsula protruding into the ocean, closer to the hill next to ours than to our own. Barely any of the light from the highway lamps reached it, but when I squinted, I made out a few thicker clots of darkness moving through the shadows there.
“That’s right beneath the rift,” he murmured. “There are a lot of beings around it, but they’re mostly in the shadows, hard to pick out at this distance. I suspect if we got closer, we’d be able to sense at least one of the two head honchos in their midst.”
“What are they doing?” I asked. It was all a vague, dark blur to me.
“I’m not sure. They?—”
Lance interrupted with a startled hiss. I stiffened, my gaze flicking over the peninsula and the sky—and snagging on what looked like a wisp of smoke briefly obscuring a patch of stars, there and then swallowed into the brief wobbling of the rift’s border.
“What was that?” I demanded. “What happened?”
“Carving up the beasties like they do the sorcerers,” the dragon shifter muttered with a twitch of his head.
Rollick’s forehead had furrowed. “It looks like they’re making some kind of sacrifice out of lesser shadowkind. Killing them and sending their essence into the rift. I have no idea what they expect that act to accomplish, though.”
A shiver ran over my skin. “So every time the rift has wavered like that, they’ve killed something?” I’d seen it three times already just in the short time I’d been within view. How many other creatures had they slaughtered in the hours it’d taken Crag and I to return to the others and then for us all to drive back here?
“Possibly. It could be they’re up to other things as well. The being that killed the beast just now didn’t even show itself.” Rollick glanced at our companions. “You two see if you can get a closer look. Lance, stick to the north—Crag, go south. Don’t let yourselves be spotted. They’re busy for now, but once the sun rises, I expect they’ll disperse.”
It occurred to me then that if the behemoth and the leviathan could bring even the powerful warriors sent by the Highest beings under their sway, Crag wasn’t necessarily any safer than Lance was. As they vanished into the darkness around us, my mouth went dry.
“What are we going to do?” I asked the demon.
“Stay here and keep an eye on the bigger picture.” Rollick rubbed his jaw. “I don’t like this at all.”
I couldn’t help thinking that his plan left me pretty useless, since I could barely see any of the picture with my human eyes. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, restlessness itching at me—but what else could I do? I wouldn’t be any more useful trying to scope things out closer to the gathering, and I’d be a lot more likely to get caught than the shadowkind men. I guessed the demon was keeping me in reserve until it seemed like a good idea to bring my powers into play.
We watched until the sky lightened just slightly to a deep blue, the first hints of dawn creeping over the eastern horizon behind us. Rollick stirred, maybe thinking it’d be time to get going soon.
“Stay here,” he said. “I want to do a quick search closer by.”
Without waiting for a response, he vanished into the night. I grimaced at what I imagined was his retreating back and then peered down the hillside again.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute later when my gaze caught on a shape moving through the shadows far down the slope below me.
It was a humanoid form, bald and gangly, its pale skin showing against the darkened landscape as it raised the small animal it’d leapt out of the shadows to pounce on to its jagged teeth. My heart skipped a beat.
Could that be one of the duo’s minions on patrol? It looked human-like enough to be able to speak. If I could use my sorcery on it, maybe we could find out what the hell was going on out here.
There was no sign of Rollick’s return. I didn’t know how long the creature would enjoy its meal before it slipped back into the shadows where I’d never find it. I wavered for only a few seconds, and then I readied my crossbow and hopped over the low crest of the hill.
The slope gave me the momentum for my strides to stretch wide. The creature’s head jerked up at my approach, but its eyes only narrowed, probably seeing me as mortal prey just as much as the animal it was snacking on. I propelled myself faster, adrenaline thrumming through my limbs, and raised the crossbow.
Panic flashed across the thing’s face. It dropped the furry body in its grasp, but before it could disappear, I fired a bolt into its knobby thigh.
Magic reverberated up my throat. “Stay where I can see you,” I said, or at least something like that in the unfamiliar syllables of the sorcery language. My tongue sizzled with the energy my voice expelled. “No ducking into your shadow form.”
The creature’s body stiffened. My magic had taken hold. I hadn’t felt any obstacle to the spell, so this must be a being that was helping the monsters of its own accord.
I was ten feet away and slowing when Rollick materialized, looming over the creature, which only came up to his waist in its hunched pose. He clamped a hand around the back of its neck as if to ensure it didn’t go anywhere and then leveled a pointed look at me. “What in the realms do you think you’re doing?”
“I saw it—I had to try,” I said, drawing up short. “We can question it.”
“You shouldn’t go running at shadowkind creatures—especially ones probably allied with our enemies—on your own. What if it’d lunged at you before you could work your sorcery? What if you’d missed with your fancy weaponry?”
I glowered at him, my annoyance only slightly tempered by the concern that was wafting off him despite his snarky tone. “You brought me along. Do you trust me to handle myself or not? We need to know what they’re doing here. If it’s worth risking Lance and Crag to find out, then it’s worth risking me too.”
To my surprise, the demon looked momentarily chagrined. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s see what this lackey has to say for herself.”
Apparently the thing was female. I wouldn’t have been able to tell. I lowered the crossbow and fixed my attention on her. When I opened my mouth, more of that strange language coursed out of me like an electrical current, carrying my will that she should answer our questions truthfully. My skin tingled with the effort, as if it’d only exhilarated me rather than tiring me out.
Rollick’s essence had definitely enhanced my abilities in ways I wasn’t sure I’d totally discovered yet.
The creature twitched and bared its teeth at me, but it didn’t—couldn’t?—argue. I met Rollick’s gaze again. “It should tell you whatever you want to know now.”
He stepped to the side of the creature and jerked her around so she was facing him. “Are you working with the shadowkind who’ve been killing sorcerers and harassing humans in Los Angeles?”
She let out a little snarl, but she answered in a gravelly voice. “Yes.”
The simplest, briefest possible answer. But the demon’s lips curled with a smirk. No doubt he was perfectly fine with playing the game of how to squeeze the right information out of it. “And your masters are a behemoth and a leviathan, aren’t they?”
The creature made a face at him. “Yes.”
“Very good. Now, what are they doing over there with that rift?”
“Offering up dead shadowkind,” she rasped, as brusquely as before.
Rollick tsked his tongue. “Yes, but why? What are they hoping to accomplish by doing that?”
Her jaw tightened, but she couldn’t hold back the words. “The essence is making the rift bigger.”
They wanted the portal between the realms to grow? I frowned at the sky and then at her.
Rollick appeared to be equally puzzled. “And why do they want it to be bigger?”
“I don’t know,” the creature growled. “We do what they say. They know what they’re doing. Please stop. If they find out I’ve told you anything, they’ll kill me.”
The blood stains on her teeth made it hard for me to feel much mercy. So many other lives were at stake if we didn’t find out all she knew.
“Why are you helping them?” I asked, stepping closer. “Why are you doing what they say?”
Her round, dark eyes fixed on me. “Why not? They’re going to bring us out of the shadows. We can have everything—this world can be ours. Let me go!”
Her words sent a chill down my back. Bring them out of the shadows? The world would be theirs? What was that even supposed to mean? Nothing good—that much I could tell.
“And how exactly—” Rollick began, shifting his grip on her neck, and the creature must have felt the tiniest loosening of his grasp. She jerked from his hold and sprang straight at me, needle-sharp claws protruding from her fingers, bloody jaws yawning wide.
My chest shuddered with a flash of fear that was both mine and Rollick’s. I stumbled backward, jerking my crossbow up—and the demon was already on her.
Rollick punched his fist straight into the creature’s chest when she was only inches from me. She sagged with a few spastic twitches, hanging off his arm. He shook her off, looked down at his smoking, gore-smeared hand with an expression of distaste, and flickered in and out of the shadows just long enough to leave the mess behind.
He met my gaze. “We probably got everything useful we could out of her anyway.”
He’d acted so fast, without thinking—and if he hadn’t, I might be dead right now. I swallowed thickly, my pulse still hammering from the shock of the moment, grappling with the unexpected urge to hug him. “Thank you.”
A strange emotion I couldn’t identify wisped from him into me, warm but somehow melancholy at the same time. “Just because you want to take risks doesn’t mean I’m going to let you succumb to them if I have any say in the matter.” He glanced down at the smoking corpse. “It wasn’t a bad gambit. We do know a little more than we did before.”
“We do.” I had no idea what to say next, but then it didn’t matter, because a jaunty voice called down from the crest of the hill.
“What are you two playing around with down there?”
As we turned toward Lance, Crag appeared beside him. The expanding dawn shimmered in the sky behind them. At Rollick’s gesture, I clambered up the slope beside him.
“We got to have a little fun of our own,” Rollick said. “Now I think we’d better get out of here.”
On the drive back to the city, Lance and Crag reported their observations, but they hadn’t seen much more than we’d already observed, just closer up. “There were a couple dozen beings gathered around,” Crag said. “And the one making the sacrifices was moving up and down to the rift through the darkness. I couldn’t get close enough to get a strong feel for him, but he was powerful. He felt at home with the ocean.”
”The sea serpent,” Lance put in. “I could take him, dragon to dragon. If he didn’t have his cheating magic.”
“But he does, so you’ll stay put,” Rollick said dryly. “They’re expanding the rift for some purpose, and it sounds like they want to establish more of a shadowkind presence in the mortal world. But they wouldn’t need a bigger rift just for that. There are hundreds across this country already.”
“Next time we’ll have to catch a minion who knows a little more,” I suggested, and he aimed a wry smile my way. But his uneasiness kept reaching me in flickers and flashes. He wasn’t happy about what we’d learned at all.
We marched up to the apartment in the brightening morning light. As we strode in through the door, Torrent wavered into view in the middle of the living room, his expression grim.
My heart leapt with relief. “You’re back!”
“I am,” he said. “But I don’t think any of you are going to like what I have to report.”